Briefs

SAS® Marketing Automation gives MLB.com a 360-degree view of how to better serve its customers and create marketing campaigns that are faster, smarter and more profitable than ever before.

Until a few years ago, Major League Baseball's Web presence left plenty of room for improvement. While the league and most of the 30 ballclubs had sites, their online efforts were inconsistent and not drawing fans the way they should have. That's because baseball fans don't just love their favorite team; THEY LOVE BASEBALL.

So in 2000 Major League Baseball's biggest players – the owners – decided to take a swing at a league site and launched MLB.com, baseball's field of dreams for the Information Age.

For help with that, MLB.com relies on SAS Marketing Automation. SAS provides sophisticated reporting capabilities and the newest generation of predictive analytics, offering MLB.com state-of-the-art data management and data discovery capabilities.

SAS helped MLB.com learn more about the fans visiting the site, thanks to the diverse range of data coming from both the clubs and MLB.com – online and offline. Customer information runs the gamut, from merchandising and ticket sales at the ballpark to everything MLB.com collects via clickstream that shows what each customer is doing on the Web site at any given time. The goal is to learn how to target fans with the right offer at the right time and place via personalized e-mails and instant messages. It also helps with cross-selling and up-selling efforts by enabling MLB.com to suggest products based on what's in a fan's shopping cart at checkout.

Here is the rest of the story.